What is IOTA?

IOTA is a revolutionary new transaction settlement and data transfer layer for the Internet of Things (IoT). It is based on a new distributed ledger technology, the Tangle, which overcomes the inefficiencies of current Blockchain designs and introduces a new way of reaching consensus in a decentralized peer-to-peer system. Using IOTA, for the first time ever, people and machines can transfer money and/or data without any transaction fees in a trustless, permissionless, and decentralized environment. This means that even nano-payments are possible without the need for a trusted intermediary of any kind.

IOTA is the missing puzzle piece for the Machine Economy to fully emerge and reach its true potential. IOTA is envisaged to be the public and permissionless backbone protocol for the IoT that enables true interoperability between all devices.

The problem IOTA solves

Anyone with a bank account is familiar with the concept of a ledger, containing records of their debits and credits. Collectively, IOTA has all entrusted financial institutions for generations to safeguard these highly sensitive records and their accuracy. With no ability to verify the data that IOTA receives on the Internet today, and with cybercrime on the rise, this delegated and unverifiable trust has become a major obstacle for an inclusive and permissionless economy.

With the advent of distributed ledger technologies, IOTA is now able to distribute and synchronize ledgers of data and money in secure, distributed, decentralized and permissionless environments. By removing the need for trusted third-parties as the gatekeepers and arbiters of truth, enormous efficiency gains, innovation opportunities and new value propositions emerge.

Blockchain technology promised a compelling vision: decentralized networks allowing open innovation and peer-to-peer transactions without intermediaries or fees. Ultimately, they were never built to execute it in full, due to inherent technical flaws in their design. As blockchain adoption has increased over the last decade, early adopters have been hit with sluggish transaction times and skyrocketing fees. As financial rewards for validating blockchain transactions became increasingly competitive, their networks have also become increasingly centralised around a few powerful actors. But the need for decentralized and permissionless systems remains, and has only increased in recent years.

By solving the inefficiencies of the Blockchain, IOTA, based on the revolutionary distributed ledger technology, the Tangle, is the missing link for the Internet of Everything and Web 3.0. Powering a secure, scalable and feeless transaction settlement layer, IOTA will empower machines and humans to participate in flourishing new permissionless economies – the most important one being the Machine Economy which we are building.

IOTA Price

The IOTA token was created to service the ‘Internet of things’ (IoT): the billions of small computing devices that are increasingly being embedded into everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data. IOTA transforms these connected machines into autonomous economic agents, enabling an entirely new ‘economy of things’.

The token was launched in June 2017 with its total supply of approximately 2.78 quadrillion IOTA (2.78 PetaIOTA) made available from the beginning. No additional IOTA will ever be created. Until IOTA adoption becomes more widespread, 1 MegaIOTA (MIOTA) is the currently accepted base unit.

On the IOTA distributed ledger, each and every connected machine can maintain its own virtual wallet and can transact with other connected machines, even for values worth fractions of a cent, with zero fees. It is predicted by 2025 that more than 75 billion devices will be connected to the Internet of things.

Disclaimers: IOTA tokens can be transferred by whoever knows the seed to the wallet. Leaving tokens on an exchange is inherently risky, as it depends on the security of your own password, your account, the exchange's servers and wallets, etc. The value of IOTA tokens is currently very volatile. IOTA Foundation does not have any means of recovering lost tokens or stabilizing the token value, buy at your own risk!

Quantum Immune: Using special signatures IOTA is resilient to the next generation of computing.

IOTA Tangle

IOTA’s distributed ledger, by contrast, does not consist of transactions grouped into blocks and stored in sequential chains, but as a stream of individual transactions entangled together.

In order to participate in this network, a participant simply needs to perform a small amount of computational work that verifies two previous transactions. Rather than creating a hierarchy of roles and responsibilities in the network, every actor has the same incentives and rewards. In order to make a transaction in the Tangle, two previous transactions must be validated with the reward for doing so being the validation of your own transaction by some subsequent transaction. With this ‘pay-it-forward’ system of validations, there is no need to offer financial rewards. Transacting with IOTA is and will always be completely fee-free.

Moreover, without the need for monetary rewards, IOTA is not limited to transactional value settlements. It is possible to securely store information within Tangle transactions, or even spread larger amounts of information across multiple bundled or linked transactions.

This structure also enables high scalability of transactions. The more activity in ‘the Tangle’, the faster transactions can be confirmed.

For more details on how the Tangle works, please read the The Tangle Whitepaper.

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IOTA Price

IOTA is a revolutionary new transaction settlement and data transfer layer for the Internet of Things. It is based on a new distributed ledger technology, the Tangle, which overcomes the inefficiencies of current Blockchain designs and introduces a new way of reaching consensus in a decentralized peer-to-peer system. Using IOTA, for the first time ever, people and machines can transfer money and/or data without any transaction fees in a trustless, permissionless, and decentralized environment.